(LENOX, Mass.) – This coming weekend marks conductor Andris Nelsons’s first Tanglewood appearance since taking on the role of Boston Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate (Nelsons officially begins his tenure as BSO Music Director with the BSO’s 2014-15 season, which opens on September 27), conducting the orchestra in an all-Dvorak program on Friday, July 11, 2014, with special guest violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and leading the BSO and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra on Saturday, July 12, in works by Strauss, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel.

Also this weekend, the Boston Pops Orchestra and conductor Keith Lockhart make their 2014 Tanglewood debut in an afternoon performance on Sunday, July 13, at 2:30 p.m., with special guest Jason Alexander. Singer, dancer, and master of comedic timing, Alexander is best-known for his appearances on television (as George Costanza in Seinfeld) and in film. With the Boston Pops, the Broadway veteran and Tony Award-winner will perform selections from Pippin and The Music Man, plus a few surprises.

On Friday, the BSO’s incoming music director Nelsons kicks off his two-week Tanglewood residency leading the ensemble in Dvo?ák’s pastoral and tuneful Symphony No. 8 — the most elegant and charming of the composer’s works in the genre — and the rarely performed 1896 symphonic poem, The Noonday Witch, based on a grim Slavic folktale concerning a fearsome witch and the unfortunate demise of a misbehaving child. Nelsons and the orchestra are joined by superstar German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist in the composer’s passionate and folk music-infused Violin Concerto.

On Saturday night, Nelsons conducts the TMCO in excerpts from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (“The Knight of the Rose”) — comprising the standard suite and the opera’s final trio — featuring sopranos Sophie Bevan and Angela Denoke (each making her Tanglewood debut) and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard. Der Rosenkavalier portrays the bittersweet love triangle between the worldly-wise, aristocratic Marshallin, her much younger lover Octavian, and the beguiling young woman, Sophie, in a rollicking comic opera. Then, Nelsons will conduct the BSO in Rachmaninoff’s colorful and energetic Symphonic Dances, his final work and a summing-up of his compositional output, written in New York in exile but full of nostalgia for the old Russia.  The program closes with Ravel’s iconic orchestral showpiece Bolero.